Kingdom Come Deliverance is out on February 13th. The game was originally pitched as an action RPG on Kickstarter and has been in development for a while now. It is developed on Cry Engine and features gorgeous visuals and a unique sword based combat system.

Recently, the news about the game having a massive 23 GB day one patch was causing a controversy since the full size of the game is already 23 GB, which means that users with their retail copy had to download the full game in the form of a patch in order to play it. Considering this is not even a small size and instead a rather large update for this game, some fans were furious that it made the retail version useless.

Martin Klima, Executive Producer at Warhorse explained the reason why the patch is so large for the game.

“Four years after our Kickstarter campaign, our game is set to be released tomorrow. The task was really big and our team although still quite small and we always wanted to deliver, to create the game we wanted and we believed you wanted. Before talking about some background, all of us at Warhorse would like to thank our community, the backers and friends who helped us to bring this dream to life by giving us the chance to develop what we believe is a unique RPG experience!

The production realities of game development mean that a ‘release’ version has to be finalized some time before the actual release date. We could have used this time to get some rest, or we could use it to create some additional content and sell it to you as DLC, but we went back to the version-to-be-released and worked on it. The results are obvious: quests are more balanced, RPG progression is smoother, the game runs faster and every facet of the game got more polish. The drawback of course is that most of the data in the old build was replaced and has to be downloaded as a patch. At a hefty size, it’s going to take some time to download and it’s a shame. Still, we strongly believe that after four years wait it will pay off to wait a little bit longer while the Day 1 patch is downloading. Trust me, it will deliver the awesome experience YOU deserve!”

So, let me stop the rumor mill dead in its tracks before everyone continues jumping to conclusions. The way that I’ve been told that the engine works, is it takes the entire game and separates the PKG or ISO into 2GB archives. If during a patch you so much as alter a 1KB text file within any of these 2GB archives, then you need to reupload the ENTIRE 2GB portion. That beings said, this is a major patch that improves overarching mechanics throughout the game, so it touches almost all of these 2GB archives in the entire game build. Essentially you are having to redownload the game to replace the existing files. It shouldn’t stack them and inflate on your harddrive, but rather replace the previously downloaded build files.

1.01 is a tiny compliance patch. 1.02 is the large patch that addresses and balances features across the entire game. Both are live right now on consoles.

Kingdom Come Deliverance will be released on February 13th for the PS4, Xbox One and PC.